Facing the world of Reason Law and Edicts stuffed into bruised-body bags In dead-end deserts On the brink of depression and suicide attuned to solitude […]

As the poem continues it grows more and more desperate, more and more urgent, setting out in relentless and vivid details, in jarring metaphors and outrageous juxtapositions, how it felt almost f ifty years ago to be living through a desperate and desperately diff icult time. The poem was begun in 1965 and f inished in 1967 when Laâbi and his friends were isolated from much of the rest of the world while at the same time connected to the spirit of revolution that was the hallmark of that period.

As Laâbi grows older, his poetry sometimes feels more sombre than in the early work, though by no means always. His strongest poems, such as ‘The Earth Opens and Welcomes You’, an elegy for another poet written in the 1990s, often combine elements of both ode and elegy. ‘The Earth Opens and Welcomes You’ is calmer than many of the earlier poems. Yes, the poem is about the earth opening to welcome a fellow poet who has died (who in fact was murdered by extremists), but it is also welcoming in a powerful second sense: the earth welcomes the living within this poem, and there is a keen sense of gratitude for that welcoming. In this way, the poem reminds me of another great ode which is at the same time an elegy, the Turkish poet Nâzım Hikmet’s ‘Things I Didn’t Know I Loved’. Written after his own experience as a political prisoner, Hikmet’s poem has the same calm and melancholy spirit as Laâbi’s, while still expressing a f ierce love of life. In this amazing passage, Laâbi creates an alchemical moment, combining grief and joy to create a third thing, an alloy stronger than either one of these emotions alone:

The earth opens and welcomes you You’r e n a ke d xvi BEYOND THE BARBED W IRE